CONNECT Player

[John Lindsay]

Hi Guys,

New to the forum, so sorry if I'm re-posting the same topic that has already been posted.

Basically I'm pretty peed off with my connect player software.

I'll give you the story... then you'll understand where I'm coming from and may be able to help me.

Once upon a time, I had the Sony NW-HD3, using Sonicstage, and was really happy with the way it all worked, the software was perfect, as was the Walkman. Then my younger brother got the NW-A1000 as a gift and used sonicstage to transfer songs to it, again, all was well and I was happy with how it was going. By this point I had built up my Library from all my CD's and had around 4000 songs on my Sonicstage Program and It was perfectly stable and I suffered no problems with the program crashing or anything of the sort. Then I broke my NW-HD3 and it's away back for repair (now on it's second time as they didn't sort the problem first time) however that's another rant...

I've now got an NW-A3000, the unit is the finest Walkman/MP3 player on the market, however Connect player lets the side down greatly. Firstly I followed the instructions on transferring from Sonicstage to Connect. It all appeared to work well to start with. And then problems started to occurr as more and more songs were on it. I now have 4800 songs in Connect player, but it once came on the screen saying that the playlist would have to be reformatted (or something along those lines, it took all the songs out and put them back in again anyway)

So, after battling to get Connect player to actually transfer all the songs to my walkman (eventually had to do them 100 at a time) I'm finding some serious problems with using it. Now when I download a song and import it to Connect player it sometimes works, sometimes not, and then when trying to transfer that song to my walkman it displays on the information bar in the bottom right of the screen " Skipping - File Failed To Import" and yet sometimes the song is actually transferred to my walkman.

When opening Connect Player I'm also having problems, the last few times I've tried shutting down and restarting computer to ensure that it's not because I'm running too many programs etc and the computer can't cope with it (even though I severely doubt it since this is the New Sony Vaio we got at Christmas) however, opening Connect Player from a newly restarted computer takes around 15 minutes, it seems to take an insane amount of time "Initializing Library" These are not my only problems, doing virtually anything, renaming songs is a nightmare as it takes forever to select the song, then after re typing the correct artist info etc, it takes another very long time to do anything after that, always has the cursor with the egg timer displayed.

One thing I'm wondering about is in the bottom corner it always appears to be updating artist links and always has been, could this be what is causing it to run slowly? Somehow I don't think so.

I phoned the number on the Sony Website, and helf to speak to an operator who didn't for a start appear to want to take the time to listen to my problem, and then appeared to be able to offer me very little help other than to revert back to Sonicstage. I don't particularly want to do this though as some if you will know I will then lose some functions on my walkman.

We have always had Sony stuff in the House, Stereo's, Televisions, DVD Players/Recorders VHS Players, Hi8 Players, Minidisc Systems, Camcorders the car is fully kitted out with a Sony X-Plod Stereo System, Amps, speakers, sub-woofer and head unit all made by Sony..... the list goes on, we have always had great faith and belief in Sony's equipment and have had very little trouble with it, which makes me think that Sony have drafted the production of Connect Player out to some-one else who to be fair has made a balls up of it. Given that Sonicstage was so good.

Any help appreciated, I know I'm not the only one having problems with it.

John

[Guest Stuge]

It`s not clear from your post, have you used SonicStage ver3.4 with your player ( features like Intelligent shuffle ,Artist Link disabled )??

[granbajo]

John,

I share your frustrations. I have managed a working environment that I am happy with, and I am sure that a number of the people here would have done something similar. I will share it with you.

• First and formemost, disable artist link and network features. This is under the Internet section at the bottom of the Preferences panel. This hasn't affected the Gracenote features, although it is not that important, see below. I had lots of problems with this as they were constantly doing "stuff" behind the covers. I also noticed that a lot of my tracks were messed up (either album name or genre changed for no particular reason, as well as album artist sometimes!)
• In my case, ConnectPlayer crashes after the second CD that I import, and that drives me nuts, as I have to reboot the machine each time. So I decided to continue ripping my CD's to atrac using SonicStage
• Becaues I like to have some of the features that come with ConnectPlayer, like playlists, or history, etc. After I ripp my CD's, I go into ConnectPlayer, and import the directories, then I copy them manually to the Walkman. I have about 4000 songs as well, and it is working OK. This approach works for me because I rarely add more than a couple of CD's at a time.

Hope this helps!

[mgillespie]

As with all of us, we are all dispointed with Connect, yet Sony still seem to be hashing it up. They have wasted another 3 months, not fixing the fundimental issues with it, but making minor tweaks.

We still don't have a version of SonicStage which works with NW-A3000.

What have Sony been up to? Busy picking their arses it seems....

[John Lindsay]

Thanks all, I will try disabling the Artist Link feature in the mean time. Hope it works, because as I say, the software if the only thing which hampers this walkman.

granbajo, how long does it take for Connect player to open on your machine?? I will click to open it now and post back as soon as it fully opens.

John

Connect Player is now open. 7 minutes to open a program .............

I opened window's task manager to check whilst opening Connect player, and my CPU usage graph jumps from around 4% instantly to 100% and stays solid untill it opens.

John

Edited April 23, 2006 by John Lindsay

[John Lindsay]

About to completely lose the plot with this........

Tried transferring 3 downloaded songs from Connect, to my walkman.

Done all three seperatley, it said Skipping "0" file failed to import on them all but I've seen that before. The songs went into the library, classed as ready for export, then I said safely remove hardware and done so.

On my walkman it said No database found, please connect compliant software.

Sony are getting on my tits, they need to sort this out, are they aware that there must be millions of unhappy customers? My friend has an Ipod and he never has any bother with it, Sony will be losing revenue aswell........

John

[Guest Stuge]

are they aware that there must be millions of unhappy customers?

Yup,They are aware of this problem & they trying to sort this out .

[granbajo]

granbajo, how long does it take for Connect player to open on your machine?? I will click to open it now and post back as soon as it fully opens.

John

About 12 seconds... I am using the lates 1.04 version. When I open it, I don't have my Walkman connected. It is a Laptop with a 1.5 Pentium M processor and 1GB of RAM

Hope this helps!

[John Lindsay]

I'm on Sony's new Vaio with An 1.86 Intel Centrino Processer and 1GB of ram also.. and as I say mines takes the best part of 10 minutes to open.

Just putting on 1.0.04 just now so we'll see how that goes.

John

Edited April 25, 2006 by John Lindsay

[John Lindsay]

All appears to work well now, Thanks for all your help.

John

[Ascariss]

All appears to work well now, Thanks for all your help.

John

great news, sony has delivered with CP for most users now, glad to see that people are experiencing the same use out of the program I had for at least 2-3 months now.

[John Lindsay]

Ah well.... Good things don't last long (apparently)

You might think after transferring 4612 songs the previous day that adding another 2 would be no problem, however you'd be wrong. It simply wouldn't do it. I clicked the add button and left it and it didn't appear to respond or do anything, so I left it for a while about 10 or 15 minutes and came back. It still hadn't done the transfer. So I decided that I would cut my losses and disconnect the player then try restarting the computer. I went through the routine of "Safely Remove Hardware" and the player started to display " Creating Database" then came up with "No Songs. Connect compliant software and transfer songs"

So I restarted my computer and re-opened Connect player. Connected my walkman after Initializing the disc, and it upated, realising that there were no songs it displayed in the transfer screen saying that I should select songs and click "add", I done so, selected all my songs as I have done in the past and as per usual it displayed the warning screen saying that it may take a long time to transfer these songs. I clicked yes and again it didn't appear to respond. So again I left it for about 10 or 15 minutes and returned to find that still nothing had happened, and so here I am (once again) appealing for your assistance.

I mean... Is it something im doing wrong? Connect player appears to work fine now, untill you try to transfer songs to a player It plays fine, you can import tracks to Connect without problem, it's still a little slow to go between tracks when you are editing artist names etc, this, I can live with (for now) although it's not completely satisfactory, however I can't do without my walkman as a School Boy who walks an hour each way to and from school each day.....

John

[JSP62]

If your trying to upload tracks and you get an error message, yet tracks till transfer....I would think this is a bad idea. The error message is highly suspect. Let's assume that while uploading the database got all messed up. Sure the tracks transfered, but perhaps you messed up the database through the process.

To go further, lets say you comp freezes while in the middle of uploading and you restart...during that process perhaps something got screwd up again even more.

You try to do some other stuff while all the errors are happening and before you know it, everything is F.U.B.A.R.!

You see what I am trying to say? I have not even touched CONNECT and nor do I have any desire. I barely use SS and when I do it is very brief. I do not have your unit, but I can understand your frustration with frustration that I have with my DAP. Granbajo seems to have a good system going and you should try that. All of us here have "a system" on how we use inferior software from Sony, you'll find yours (or in this case) soon enough.

Good Luck

Edited May 3, 2006 by JSP62

[Beethovenian]

I'm making my first attempts of working with Connect Player and a NW-A3000, which I got as a stopgap until a higher capacity player comes out (I wanted the new bitrates and the navigation scheme). Connect Player itself seems reasonably stable, but when it comes to transferring, things get more complicated. For some reason, the software just hangs on two tracks. Strangely, it hangs even after I deleted the original albums, re-ripped them and re-imported them. I get the error message after a long time. Have no idea what's wrong. Still, I'll stick with Connect for now just because it felt to me that the player acts faster than when loaded via SonicStage. It's a shame, because SonicStage is much better.